Gmail running on Xserves?

[rtt2]

All,

Cringley let slip in his column yesterday that Gmail runs on Xserves.

The exact quote is "...especially since Gmail, itself, runs on Apple xServe 1u boxes."

Is this true, or is he simply blowing hot air?

I always thought that google ran their entire infrastructure on Linux (Debian?) with commodity x86 hardware. Does it make sense for them to be running xserves for gmail? If so, are they using OS X, or a PPC Linux variant, or something more exotic (NetBSD--unlikely, but?)

Can anyone shed any light? This is the first I've heard of this.

 

[grapes911]

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/31/2341249

 

[Mord]

judgeing on the number of servers google has if they ran only xserves apple would almost double there sales

 

[tomf87]

I read once that Google technicians actually build the servers from parts and they just slide into racks. In addition, they also wrote their own operating system as well so they have total control over their systems.

 

[edesignuk]

Not in a million years would google use XServes. I heard that they use many hundreds (maybe thousands) of cheap, easily replaceable systems that have pretty much complete fault tolerance between them (if one falls over it has no effect on the system). They can just scrap the box and replace with another unit.